This is Memorial Device is an adaptation of David Keenan’s eponymous novel about a fictional post-punk band from Airdrie, a small Scottish town fringed between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It debuted at London’s Riverside Studios last night, following a sold out run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022.
Paul Higgins (The Thick of It, Slow Horses) plays Ross Raymond, the amateur archivist of the band, assembling a portrait of the 80s post-punk scene from boxes of ephemera cached in his basement.
There is an aptly room-like simplicity to the space and the staging (Anna Orton). You feel that you have unintentionally stumbled into a community centre in an obscure Scottish town for the 30-somethingth annual commemoration of a band you have never heard of. The only ways in and out are through the stage doors. If you are late to the meeting, everyone in the town will know about it.
Raymond appears from one of these doors. He walks out casually while the lights are still up, going largely unnoticed until he raises his voice to thank everyone for coming. ‘You know me’ his manner seems to say, ‘you know the fictive band I am going to talk about, you know the people I am going to describe’.
Higgins’ delivery of the role is excellent. There is an earnestness which sustains the play from his very first words. A genuine sense that he is remembering as he describes it. Yet, as the play develops, the subject of his earnestness becomes increasingly less important than the figure of Raymond himself. Indeed, his role as the only direct interlocutor is a crucial difference between Eatough’s adaptation and Keenan’s novel. While some of the other characters remain, they do so only as video recordings, projected on the back wall amidst a pile of Raymond’s stuff.
We watch as Raymond assembles a mannequin mock-up of the band, instrument by instrument, limb by limb. At one point, he describes what he is trying to capture as ‘the ghost of a feeling’, and there is something fraught, tragic even, in the way he adorns the armature of each figure in turn.
There is much to the sentimental charm of This is Memorial Device. Graham Eatough’s adaptation of the anecdotal quality of the humour is true to Keenan’s original, believably situating the milieu of the play. It captures a time of countless subcultures. Of the inventiveness and the individuated quality of analogue media. Of vinyl and cassettes, of cameras that required two hands. Of the static of television screens and car radios. Band names like ‘Occult Theocracy’ and ‘Messerschmitt’; lead singers with drug-induced anterograde amnesia. These are all unmistakable features of a period which now, to Raymond, seems long since faded.
Eatough’s direction sees a brilliant blending of these media as means of sentimental expression. The cyclical motifs of Stephen Pastel’s and Gavin Thomson’s music and sound design are also notable, as a powerful score overlays Raymond frantic attempts to play upon the instruments draped on his mannequins.
‘Yes. Who. We’ is the refrain Raymond returns to throughout. In many ways it is an apt tricolon for the chronology of the life which Raymond attempts to describe. One in which the search for affirmation, for a ‘yes’, comes before the question of what, or who, constitutes it. Part tragic, part comic, Raymond remains—despite his evocations to the audience—without an answer. A middle aged man alone in something between his basement and a community centre, assembling and disassembling the scattered relics and people of his past.
This is Memorial Device is at Riverside Studios until 11th May 2024.
